The Development of Psychology

As with anything complex, psychology is made up of an evolving combination of basic fundamental components. Human beings tend to regard themselves as being superior to all other forms of life. However, what people tend to overlook is that the classification of superiority is, on its own, a completely arbitrary distinction. For instance, some mammals can run, climb, or swim faster than human beings, and others are even better at hunting. What comes to mind when making these classifications is, how can we say that a leopard is better at hunting than a human being? Should we believe it, or are there other factors to consider? Well again, the classification of superiority is completely arbitrary, even in this defined respect. We could say that the leopard is a better hunter, because its body is more naturally equipped to deal with the prey in its environment. But, a human in the same environment would have to rely upon building tools to hunt, and they are less capable of catching prey should they take to running. Conversely, we could say that a human is a better hunter, simply because they are smart enough to create tools and compensate for almost any environment. The second argument is the one that I have heard most often--when the listener is awarded time to consider the question--and that brings me to a very important aspect in terms of our collective perspectives into human psychology. We tend to classify ourselves as superior to other forms of life on the basis of intelligence. When compounded with other respects, we observe that we are more capable of compassion, understanding, learning, growing, and most fundamentally, empathy. Empathy is one of the main components of psychology, and serves as the evolutional root of intelligence on the whole. Using empathy, human-beings have developed the tools necessary for understanding and resolving the problems of other human beings. That is, when one person hurts, another person hurts as well. To resolve the problem of emotional pain, we did as we always do: we developed tools. This gave birth to the establishment of rules and laws, which have evolved (along with humans) to represent more symbolic gestures, such as morality and the essence of "right" and "wrong" (even when such distinctions remain arbitrary.) For instance, in certain societies it is seen as "wrong" to commit infidelity, and "right" to go to school, but another society might promote the idea of infidelity to foster greater reproductive success, or frown upon the idea of studying rather than hunting. To make the point even clearer, our society has condemned the idea of murder as a social, moral, and spiritual wrong-doing, but a dynasty might reward the murderer of their king with a direct claim to the throne. The distinction between each classification is arbitrarily defined by circumstances, and propelled by the overwhelming tendency of human beings to attach symbolic meanings to every natural principle that they encounter. Symbolic perception is another major component of psychology in human beings. Through evolutionary considerations, the human brain has become wired to see the world in terms of its symbolic interpretations. The development of this kind of thinking is due largely in part to how much easier and faster it is for the brain to process packets of information, rather than the bits and pieces separately. I speculate that it was mainly developed as a method of avoiding predators, seeking out prey, or understanding other human beings, which promoted evolutionary success for the process of natural selection. We naturally respond to images that we see with internal symbols that represent their meanings. That way, when an ancient ancestor observes a colleague waving his arms, it's usually a sign of danger. Similarly, when a woman spends time with another male, the husband usually gravitates towards the symbolic thinking pattern of possible infidelity (which was developed by ancestors over thousands of years), and he has quickly perceived a sign of danger (much more quickly than the guy who has not developed a similar symbolic thinking pattern.) So we have established that symbolic perception has roots in our evolutionary development, so how does that help us? Well, we now have an understanding of the origins of a major component of developmental psychology. But one of the reasons symbolic perception is so important to developmental psychology is its creation of another compound component to developmental psychology, namely religion. Given the basis of the evolved essence of "right" and "wrong" and morality defined upon the roots of various ancestral principles, human beings used their tendency to define natural principles in terms of their arbitrary symbolic distinctions to compound the original basis into the general foundation of spiritual and religious awareness. This foundation laid the work for every major religion which is prevalent in any society, which combines the idea of human superiority and arbitrary morality (which at this point had become more well defined), to establish a more powerful role to "empathy", which served as yet another solution to the (developed) empathetic observations of human cruelty (which often pales in comparison to the cruelty of other mammals, with a confounding factor of the development of empathy versus the development of none, to vastly tip the scale (as far as interpretation is concerned.)) That is to say, as human beings developed empathy, they saw more things wrong with their society. Thus, we have the creation of spiritual rules and principles, based upon the notion that human beings are too complex (in comparison to other animals) to just be a collection of earthly components. We will return to the idea of religion playing a role in the development of a young mind. However, I am interested in the derivation of the idea of spirituality, which plays a key role in the foundations of religion. As I mentioned above, humans are widely regarded as being too complex to be considered strictly material beings. We each seem to have personalities, we are able to make choices, and we can observe the world around us with remarkable intelligence. So how could something so complex also be so robotic as to have been completely constructed from earth and water? The explanation is that human thought is simply the byproduct of a vast and interacting set of basic fundamental principles, established and preserved by the order of natural selection. The sheer magnitude of the set of principles results in the illusion of choice, since there are exponentially more possible interactions between each principle, and various other external stimuli can tip the scale across several thousand options with the weight of a feather. Lets consider an example of this... I often like to consider myself when making an example, so let us analyze why I made the choice of writing this article. I am writing this with the intention of sharing, promoting, and preserving knowledge in this area. I want to promote knowledge so that I might be recognized in my society as useful and productive. I want to be recognized as productive so that I am accepted, can obtain several degrees, and so that I can go on to make a lot of money (as opposed to living as a bum off the streets.) I want to make money so that I have a decent life. I want to have a decent life so that I can promote better reproductive success. I want better reproductive success because that is one of the basic desires that led to my ancestry surviving to give me birth in the first place. Every thought and action can be explained in terms of a collection of fundamental principles, including those which may even go against some of the basic psychological traits preserved and passed down from ancestry. However, decisions and actions such as those (these may include playing a game rather than studying, being a mass murderer, or sleeping all day instead of getting a job) require more compounded principles to explain, most of which can be found in the person's childhood home.